Importance of reliability when dimensioning an optical transparent network with physical impairments awareness

Optical network telecommunication operators are adopting optical transparency to make the channel routing more flexible, optimize their cost and meet customer requirements. But, the optical signal accumulates physical impairments along the transmission so that its quality should be assessed before setting-up the connection. The relevance of an estimate depends on the uncertain knowledge of the physical parameters. This paper shows the importance of accounting for uncertainties within a physical impairment aware dimensioning tool.